‘Every customer needs to make their own decision’: Inside Everpure’s data sovereignty balancing act

Everpure is in a peculiar position when it comes to discussions around data sovereignty.

As a hardware vendor, it isn’t subject to the same scrutiny as cloud hyperscalers, but as a US company, it does face scrutiny from EU customers worried about dependency on foreign tech providers.

Patrick Smith, Everpure’s EMEA CTO, told ITPro the company is keen to engage in proactive and pragmatic discussions on this topic. Indeed, Everpure’s position on the matter is that once their storage solutions are deployed in a customer data center, it’s a hands-off approach.

“We like to be very upfront about that,” Smith told ITPro at Pure Accelerate 2026.

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“When customers buy our tech and deploy it in their data centers, it’s under their control. We’re obviously a US provider of technology, but it’s under their control.”

Smith admits that the situation becomes tricky when it comes to telemetry monitoring. Everpure’s Pure One software solution collects telemetry data from arrays sitting in that data center, tracking configuration and performance metrics, and it runs in the cloud.

Everpure’s view on this, according to Smith, is that because this doesn’t contain mission-critical data, it’s not actually a big customer talking point in terms of data sovereignty posture. They at least have a choice here, though, he added.

“Every customer needs to make their own decision on that,” he told ITPro. “Some customers may choose to run what we call ‘dark sites’, where they do their own monitoring and telemetry in their own on-prem systems.”

Shifting priorities

Engagement with Everpure customers certainly shows data sovereignty has become a big concern over the last two years, according to Smith. Rising geopolitical tensions and regulatory considerations have prompted a rethink for many European firms on how they handle their data - and crucially, who they choose to safeguard it.

In response to legislative changes, a host of hyperscalers have launched dedicated ‘sovereign cloud’ services for European customers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft.

Meanwhile, the cloud repatriation trend, which dominated 2022 and 2023, is making somewhat of a comeback as enterprises look to bring data back on-prem to bolster both resilience and data protection capabilities.

The majority (97%) of companies plan to ditch public cloud in favor of in-house infrastructure, particularly for mission-critical workloads and data, according to a survey from Node4 from June last year.

The majority (97%) of companies plan to ditch public cloud in favor of in-house infrastructure, particularly for mission-critical workloads and data, according to a survey from Node4 from June last year.

“Right now, a lot of organizations are revisiting their cloud strategy, so digital sovereignty and data sovereignty are one of the triggers for them saying we’ve almost sleepwalked into this position where we have such heavy dependency on the hyperscalers,” Smith said.

Smith revealed that a prospective customer, a big European bank, was actively reconsidering a long-running cloud strategy while other customers have been making moves on this front.

“It’s a case of what was once a ‘cloud-first’ strategy, or a ‘cloud-only’ strategy, is now more of a ‘cloud considered’, and the criteria that go into that consideration are criticality of applications, the sensitivity of data,” he said.

Everpure’s sovereignty pitch

Everpure’s pitch to customers on this front is that if customers want a pure play hardware provider for their data center infrastructure, they’re the go-to option here, particularly for those repatriating workloads back on-prem.

“People have now got used to that cloud consumption model, and so the ability for us to deliver a cloud consumption model that spans on-prem, colocation, and the public cloud gives them that,” he claimed.

If they’re looking for more of a cloud-esque approach, then the company’s growing array of data management tools, such as its recently launched Data Intelligence platform, also represents a huge opportunity for Everpure.

The new platform aims to simplify data management processes, enabling users to improve data visibility and break down long-standing infrastructure silos.

Fred Lherault, EMEA CTO, Emerging at Everpure, said data visibility improvements delivered by the platform could provide marked benefits in terms of shoring up sovereignty practices.

“For a lot of organizations, they can't even say what data they have where, so even before they start thinking about changing, they can't answer basic questions, so that's one of the things I'm really excited about with data intelligence, is being able to answer those types of questions,” he told ITPro.

“That is actually the same set of questions that the compliance team is asking, that the cyber team is asking, that the AI team is asking,” Lherault added. “So there is really an opportunity to go and help a lot of people in a given organization that are trying to come to grips with that.”

Dependency concerns

For EU customers specifically, dependency isn’t just a case of who your cloud provider is and whether they’re a US-based company, Smith noted. Running parallel to data sovereignty considerations, concerns are growing over energy dependency and the impact of outages.

Two high-profile cloud outages at AWS and Microsoft last year shone a light on the scale of dependency in Europe and the potential domino effect that a major incident could cause for European organisations.

“I think the outages last year at both AWS and Azure were interesting in the fallout of those outages impacting UK-based companies, that perhaps they didn’t realize that they were dependent on,” he said.

“I think it gets even more interesting when you look at the degree of separation, because suddenly you realize that SaaS companies that you’re dependent on, where they are running their technology.

“So you may think that you’re nicely insulated or isolated from those outages, and then you suddenly find that your SaaS provider is impacted. It expands the scope of sovereignty.”

Sovereignty washing

With a big push on data sovereignty across Europe, the debate over what exactly constitutes ‘sovereign’ in terms of services has reached a boiling point, with ‘sovereignty washing’ emerging as a new industry buzzword.

CISPE, for example, has questioned the legitimacy of some services, going so far as to launch a framework designed to verify a provider’s sovereignty credentials.

Smith said the debate over true sovereign services cannot be ignored and weighs heavily on the minds of many executives. During a panel discussion ahead of Pure Accelerate this week, Smith noted that concerns over this topic will likely continue.

“I think that sovereignty washing is really important,” he said. “It’s going to come down to lawyers discussing it, because it’s all about the small print. Technologists aren’t going to make that decision on what good looks like; it’s going to be lawyers.”

“That comes with the hyperscalers bringing out regions that they call ‘sovereign regions’, and it’s a label, but what does it actually mean? It deals with the locality of the data; it may deal with the country and citizenship of the people who operate it, but does it tick all the boxes necessary to eliminate the risk?”

Smith compared sovereign services to insurance policies, noting that enterprises need to be “absolutely certain” that they’re getting what they pay for.

“You don’t want to go down a sovereign path and then suddenly find when things don’t go well that it hasn’t addressed all of the risks.”

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